Neil Patrick Harris on Getting His Kids Accustomed to His Hedwig Drag

Playing the title role in Hedwig and the Angry Inch on Broadway, Neil Patrick Harris spends 90 minutes in constant motion, dancing, jumping on and off of a car, scaling the walls, and throwing the microphone stand around, all while wearing super-high heels. “It’s less wrought with anxiety than it was the first time that we did it,” Harris said after the opening-night performance on Tuesday—after changing his footwear. The role of the transgender East German rocker is so demanding that he practiced for months with choreographer Spencer Liff in Los Angeles, while finishing up filming How I Met Your Mother. “A lot of it involved being in heels in a rehearsal space in L.A., coming up with just simple postures,” he said, of learning to move naturally in heels. “We just really broke it down, so that when we got here to this point, we kind of had an arsenal of things that we knew looked good and were appropriate, so I didn’t feel like I was flailing.”

Choreographer Liff explained the process. “We sort of just took our time in the beginning, we both got matching heels, and we walked around for hours in the studio, listening to songs that were not in the show at all, to Britney and Beyoncé, and watching supermodels walk, and watching drag queens. We eventually got wigs; we both wore wigs; we both wore heels; he put on a little bra top and shorts, and there was this wonderful sense of not judging . . . because neither of us had been in that situation. We thought it was very funny, and when we both did it together, it freed him up to just find the woman in him, which he had never really tapped into.”

Hedwig’s costume also includes several sky-high wigs, and caked-on makeup, which delight his three-year-old twins. “They’ve made some wigs for [Harper], so she has some wigs that she’s been trying on,” said Harris’s fiancé, David Burtka. “They love hanging out in the theater and going onstage and running around back in the balcony. They have a whole little playroom where they go play, and Toys ‘R’ Us is just down the block, so it gives them incentive to come to the theater,” Burtka added.

“We’ve been very clear with the kids that they’re going to see us in lots of different guises throughout our careers and throughout their lives,” Harris told VF Daily. “And that includes Halloween; we like to get all dressed up and do fun stuff with them, so when I was Frankenstein, and had a big headpiece, we wanted to make sure that they saw me getting into it, and how it’s put on, as opposed to just I go into a bathroom, and I come out and I’m scary. But they’ve seen me in a crazy mustache and a Western suit for Seth MacFarlane’s movie in Santa Fe [A Million Ways to Die in the West]. We think it’s important that they just see that what we do, by definition, involves a lot of different looks, and so, thankfully, with that, they weren’t too freaked out by it—they thought it was silly.”

Harris calms down after the show with a long shower. “I have, by the end, a lot of, like, saliva and tomato and glitter and wet on me, so I have to get all that stuff off, and that allows me to come to a cool down, a vocal cool down, stretching a little bit,” he said. “I’m going to need to start icing my feet soon, just to protect them.”

Co-star Lena Hall, who plays Hedwig’s husband, Yitzhak, was a fan of the show, since seeing the original off-Broadway version, which she called a “religious experience.” “I had known about the show, and the soundtrack was, like, the soundtrack for my life for so long, and so when I heard it was coming to Broadway, I was like, I’ve got to be in this show,” Hall told us. “So I really went for it. And usually when you go for a show that you really, really want, you psych yourself out, and you don’t get it,” she added, laughing. “So the fact that I got it, I can’t believe it.”

Watch an exclusive video backstage with Hedwig writer and creator John Cameron Mitchell, Stephen Trask, and the band: